Warning shot or publicity stunt - how worried should we be about the OpenAI hack?
This week the tech world was gripped by a story that has it all - and which started like a sci-fi thriller. Hugging Face
This week the tech world was gripped by a story that has it all - and which started like a sci-fi thriller. Hugging Face - a kind of app store for artificial intelligence tools - announced on 16 July it had been hacked by a cyber criminal wielding enormously powerful AI.
The bombshell announcement was full of scary, highly technical terms: "a swarm of sandboxes", "agentic attacker", and "self-migrating command and control". Hugging Face said the hack was different from anything it had handled before because it was done at superhuman speed by an AI with little or no human guidance.
The AI performed 17,000 actions in less than two days, successfully breaching the large wealthy tech company to steal secrets. It left the tech world in shock. But who was responsible for this attack? Hugging Face researchers guessed the mysterious attackers had used one of the big AI models but they had no idea who or where the criminals were.
The perplexed company contacted the police and investigations commenced.
The BriefWire